AMD Sued Over Alleged Deceptive Marketing

Advanced Micro Devices is facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly committing fraud and deceptive marketing related to its Bulldozer CPU. A consumer named Tony Dickey filed a complaint against AMD at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Complaint against AMD

In his complaint, Mr. Dickey said the computer chip manufacturer violated the Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the Unfair Competition Law (UCL) in California.

Mr. Dickey accused AMD of false advertising, breach of an express warrant, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment. He argued that the company falsely claimed that its new Bulldozer CPU platform has “8-cores,” which means it can perform eight instructions independently and simultaneously. According to him, the Bulldozer CPU has only four cores, not eight.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Dickey said, “AMD tricked consumers into buying its Bulldozer processors by overstating the number of cores contained in the Bulldozer chips. Average consumers in the market for computer CPUs lack the requisite technical expertise to understand the design of [AMD’s] processors, and trusts [AMD] to convey accurate specifications regarding its CPUs.”

Mr. Dickey further argued that tens of thousands of consumers were misled into buying the Bulldozer CPU because AMD did not provide the accurate specifications of the product.

The complainant is demanding statutory and punitive damages as well as litigation expenses, pre and post-judgment interests from AMD. He is also seeking injunctive, and declaratory relief deemed reasonable.

Allegation against AMD has no merit

A related report from ExtremeTech indicated that the allegations against AMD had no merit citing the reason that the company made modest improvements to the overall efficiency and performance of Bulldozer CPU since its launching.

“Dickey’s lawsuit is wrong on other areas of fact as well. Bulldozer does share a single FPU block per work unit, but consumer workloads are rarely FPU-heavy. Bulldozer is absolutely capable of executing eight threads simultaneously, and executing eight threads on an eight-core FX-8150 is faster than running that same chip in a four-thread, four-module mode. Bulldozer can decode 16 instructions per clock (not eight), and it can keep far more than eight instructions in flight simultaneously,” according to Extreme Tech.

Author: Marie CaburalMarie received her Bachelors Degree in Mass Communication from New Era University. She is a former news writer and program producer for Nation Broadcasting Corporation (NBC-DZAR 1026), a nationwide AM radio station. She was also involved in events management. Marie was also a former Young Ambassador of Goodwill during the 26th Ship for Southeast Asian Youth Program (SSEAYP). She loves to read, travel and take photographs. She considers gardening a therapy.